Added support for Cinema 4D versions R20 through R23.
Made improvements throughout the plugin to improve the user experience. Almost everything has been improved in at least a small way. The overall workflow has been improved and has generally been made more fun.
Dramatically increased the rendering speed of the plugin, by using Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) instructions found in modern Intel processors. On some scenes the rendering speed has been increased by a factor of four!
Added real-time rendering capability to the plugin. This capability existed in our Lasershow Converter MAX and BEYOND 3D products, but we were unable to add it to Lasershow Converter 4D until now.
Improved the Laser Preview window, making it resizable, and also providing more information.
Added the ability to show information relevant to laser frame rendering in several Cinema 4D rendering windows. The additional information shows the number of points in the frame, as well as the Z-axis coordinates of the rear-most and front-most elements in the scene. This information is very handy when using Beam Brush.
Added
Soft Line capability to the LC4D Tag. This allows you to create faded line endings on any object independently. In order to do faded line endings previously, you needed to import frames of the animation and perform a post-process. This created extra work and also provided sub-optimal visual results.
Added
Beam Brush capability to the LC4D Tag. This allows you to create animations that use dynamic beam divergence capability built into Kvant's line of Beam Brush projectors.
As a final note for this version, Lasershow Converter 4D was released in 2004, as an add-on for the LD2000 platform which was released in 1999. At the time the LD2000 SDK was the most developed of its time. However, LD2000 is now a 22-year-old platform, and when compared to BEYOND, LD2000 really has a lot of limitations. The newer BEYOND platform is much more open and expansive from a development standpoint. For the past few versions of Lasershow Converter 4D, we struggled to create code that worked well with both LD2000 and BEYOND, but during the development of version 6.0, this struggle really hindered our ability to add the new features you see documented in this help file. Since the LD2000 platform is now 22 years old, and is no longer sold by Pangolin, we have removed support for LD2000. From this point forward, Lasershow Converter 4D will only work with BEYOND.